A just transition for land

By Bradley Hiller

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) and the G20 Leaders’ Summit now concluded, attention turns to this week’s gathering of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Panama. Whether the event delivers progress on sustainable land management and drought resilience in a just and equitable manner hinges largely on one familiar factor: finance.
Insufficient funding has emerged as a stumbling block in advancing multiple Sustainable Development Goals, with SDG15 – focused on the protection, restoration, and sustainable use of land and terrestrial ecosystems – receiving some of the lowest levels of finance. But human well-being, and progress towards many other SDGs, depend directly on healthy soil, water, and terrestrial biodiversity.
Already, up to 40 per cent of our planet’s lands are degraded and deteriorating, jeopardising the health and livelihoods of more than three billion people, especially poor rural communities, small-scale farmers, women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and other at-risk groups. Annual economic losses linked to desertification, land degradation, and drought amount to $878 billion – far more than the investments needed to address them. A just transition from an exploitative land economy to one that is restorative, inclusive, and resilient is urgently needed.
The concept of a just transition has become central to discussions on climate action – in particular, the energy transition. For example, it is understood that European communities dependent on coal production need support, so that they can secure good jobs in emerging clean industries. Globally, numerous initiatives have been created to support a just energy transition. But no equivalent exists for the land sector (which includes agriculture, forestry, and other land use), even though the need for a “just land transition” to support interconnected climate, nature, and human-development imperatives is at least as great.
Land-related activities account for nearly a quarter of greenhouse-gas emissions and employ over 20 times more workers than the energy sector globally. Moreover, unlike energy-sector workers – who tend to be formally employed, with regular, reasonably strong wages – many land workers are self-employed or seasonal, meaning that they have minimal safety nets and low financial resilience. In fact, extreme poverty is typically concentrated in degraded rural communities, which are often among the most exposed to climate and non-climate shocks.

Now, these communities are being forced to pursue their own transitions, with minimal support from the international community – including the countries that are most responsible for climate change. For example, climate change has left nomadic pastoralists in the Horn of Africa, whose own carbon footprint is negligible, with no choice but to alter millennia-old migration routes, owing to water scarcity and land degradation. Such unstructured and risky transitions exacerbate poverty, inequality, and marginalisation, increasing the risk of instability, out-migration, and conflict – and underscoring the need to support vulnerable communities and ecosystems on the frontline of climate change, nature loss, and land degradation.
But the news isn’t all bad. Momentum is gathering around land and soil restoration. China has long been a land-restoration pioneer, exemplified by the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program that began in 1978. And a growing number of countries are emulating such initiatives with local efforts to strengthen resilience increasingly complemented by national plans for halting and reversing land degradation and improving drought management.
Progress is also being made at the regional level. Africa’s Great Green Wall initiative – which aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon, and create ten million green jobs by 2030 – is being implemented in 22 countries. The Middle East Green Initiative, backed by up to $2.5 billion in seed funding from Saudi Arabia, includes the world’s largest landscape-restoration programme.
At the global level, frameworks like the 30x30 land conservation goal, the UNCCD-led Land Degradation Neutrality initiative, and the G20 Global Land Initiative point to a growing consensus on the importance of land protection and restoration. The recently announced Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership aims to support the world’s most drought-vulnerable countries. Yet finance is still lagging behind ambition. At last year’s UNCCD gathering in Riyadh, participants pledged over $12 billion in funding for “drought resilience, land restoration, and the fight against land degradation,” which is a step in the right direction, but nowhere near enough to meet global goals. For that, the world must mobilise $278 billion annually.
Addressing this shortfall requires an innovative combination of financing mechanisms. Private finance can be mobilised through specialised debt instruments, such as green or restoration bonds. These are already gaining traction: the global sustainable bond market reached $1.1 trillion in 2024. Moreover, companies can invest in land-based communities, in order to secure sustainable commodity supply chains, restore soil health, and support resilient livelihoods.
Blended finance models – which combine, say, philanthropic grants with concessional lending – can ensure that support reaches remote communities. Meanwhile, development institutions can back national efforts, and parametric (index-based) insurance linked to early-warning systems can provide a safety net when shocks arrive. Other possible sources of finance include emerging carbon and biodiversity markets, remittances, crowdfunding, Islamic finance and special-purpose financing vehicles. The embrace of digital platforms and AI tools may facilitate improvements in access and affordability.
Policy also has a crucial role to play. Unlocking financing at scale requires efforts to lower capital costs, remove barriers to access, and create the right incentives. Stronger land tenure, fiscal reform, and targeted subsidies and tariffs can also help to support sustainable land and soil systems. Policies that empower women, youth, and Indigenous communities are critical. At the global level, UNCCD, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change should not each operate in a vacuum; land, biodiversity, and climate are inextricably linked, and should be treated as such.
Like the climate transition more broadly, a land transition is occurring, whether we like it or not. The question is whether it will be unfair, chaotic, and reactive, or whether world leaders, development institutions, and other stakeholders will act now to ensure that it is just, effective, and leaves no one behind. Project Syndicate, 2025